I can imagine a few more instances that would take him out. Another disgruntled lady. Fist fight with a worker at a factory visit. Total foot in mouth gaff. . .
In any case the prudent course is “Suspend Campaign” and not “Drop Out”. These are two different things - one suggests withdrawing your candidacy, the other does not. And the post title is incorrect.
So have I:
And that’s the argument. It’s basically “All choices are bad, so I’m going to opt out and let everyone else deal with it”.
If you can look at the world of 4 years ago versus the world of today and say “Meh, it’s ok for this to continue” then I get that position. If you can look at the effort of trying for radical change and say “Meh, if we fail, the world of today as a consequence is fine vs a world of 4 years ago”, then I also get that position.
The position I don’t get is “Meh, ignore the reality on the ground today if we fail”.
It’s that, but it seems to me it’s also about not caring about the more vulnerable among us, who will bear the brunt of actual violence that comes out of street actions. 
The vulnerable are always the first victims in any sort of conflict and in any sort of social unrest.
And when oppressed people riot, it’s always their own neighborhoods they burn down. Something that plays out in metaphor through liberal politics even more often than it happens in real life.
How about “The world of today is a consequence of the world of four years ago, and there’s no reason to think that going back to the world of four years ago wouldn’t lead us right back here, just like it did last time.”
Which they often do not have a stake in? Do you think they could get to the neighborhoods where the elite live to burn them down? [ETA] Without getting wiped out, I mean.
Which is why it is pointless and self-defeating.
Often they go from little to nothing, the corner grocery store gone, replaced by a liquor store. If there’s some moral victory to be gained by that, great, I guess.
That’s there fault, rather than the fault of the landlords? People who own nothing are to blame because sometimes they riot against injustices in their communities?
Have those riots ever fixed an injustice? I understand the rage, but from what I’ve seen the communities are always weakened and set back when it happens.
Riots mostly are generally not super effective at fixing injustices.
More calculated and targeted actions certainly can be.
That is still looking at the consequences of the past, instead of the consequences of the present, to inform future decisions. There is no way to decouple the consequences of future decisions from the present, which means one has to take the present into consideration when making decisions, too.
Raynal’s prediction came true on the night of 21 August 1791, when the slaves of Saint-Domingue rose in revolt; thousands of slaves attended a secret vodou ceremony as a tropical storm came in – the lighting and the thunder was taken as auspicious omens – and later that night, the slaves began to kill their masters and plunged the colony into civil war
So it was basically the exact opposite of what we’re talking about here.
How so? We’ve got a crisis and a shit ton of angry people with little to lose.
If only the police were actually protecting those neighbourhoods (as opposed to harassing the residents) instead of reserving that service for wealthy and middle class ones.
A concept to familiarise yourself with in this regard:
We all work with what we have. Poor and marginalised and oppressed people usually don’t have a lot to begin with, so sometimes burning their own stuff to attract attention is all they can work with.
They were able to attack the people who hurt them. Ghetto riots, as pointed out by everyone else, are fundamentally incapable of accomplishing that.
Accelerationism never works. It doesn’t make more supporters, it makes more corpses. Ask a sympathetic historian how the historical equivalent to “First Trump, then us” turned out last time.
“A riot is the language of the unheard” Dr. King said, and he understood why riots happened. But as to your question, the Watts uprising DID in fact cause positive social change, as the state of California did managed to accurately describe the cause of the riot and did seek to address it somewhat.
This is not an either/or question, though. Riots (or more accurately, uprisings) are indeed the voice of people who have been consistently not heard or ignored politically. The riot as an action has deep historical roots and there is literally no way to give an answer as to whether or not a riot is a successful tactic, because there have been so many, with so many differing outcomes that there is no singular answer as to whether or not “riots work.” If we look at the modern, American experience of a riot, the answer there is that it can prove to be an effective strategy for moving the discussion along, if nothing else. It can also be a means of stopping effective change.
But more often than not, what’s a riot and what’s a revolution depends on who is doing it. If it’s poor or marginalized people, it’s merely a riot that’s just about looting and troublemaking. If it’s white men of a particular landowning class, it’s a righteous uprising.
So, I have no singular answer for you, because a question like “is a riot a viable means of social change” needs a more complicated answers than yes or no. It’s less about the rioters and more about the reaction of society to understand and make change.
Now… because I need a bit of fucking levity in this frustrating thread… here is baby yoda pushing a button. You’re welcome.
Really? Can we not use dog whistles?
I don’t understand what you are trying to explain to me.
I know why people do it. Everybody knows.
I don’t see any examples of it accomplishing anything positive.
A pretty good metaphor for going on about how one is going sit out the election because Biden is awful, don’t you think?
What’s the dog whistle? The kind of community that is usually so beaten down that riots start is frequently one where dramatic de-facto racial segregation has occurred.
